How to remove a package at end of life

When a package reaches the end of its useful life, the following procedure will let other people -- and automated processes! -- know both not to expect any more releases, and why it was removed. The process is called retirement.

Contents

Procedure

Retire only in development/EPEL branches!Do not retire packages in other branches than Branched (until the Final Freeze), Rawhide (master) and EPEL branches (el6, epel7).
When you need to add package from EPEL to any RHEL release, only retire EPEL branch when package is released in that RHEL release.

Please execute the following steps in the order indicated.

RPM

If the package is being replaced by some other package, ensure that the Obsoletes/Provides tags are properly set by the new package, see Renaming/Replacing Guidelines.

GIT

Run fedpkg retire DESCRIPTION in all non-stable Fedora branches and EPEL
branches, if applicable. The retiring needs to start with the oldest branch
(e.g. retire on f25 before you retire on master)

Remarks

The DESCRIPTION parameter should explain why the package was retired, good messages are:

Obsoleted by bar

Renamed to bar

The command will remove all files from the branch, add a file name dead.package containing the description and push the changes.

git rm all files in the other branches only if there are special factors at work, like licensing issues, or package being removed completely from Fedora.

If you retired master before other older branches you want to retire, just continue with the older branches. It will still work, but will block the package in more Koji tags, because tag inheritance will not be used automatically then.

Upstream Release Monitoring

Koji

To keep retired packages from being pushed to the mirrors, they need to be blocked in koji. This will happen during the next Rawhide/Branched compose (also for EPEL). If it did not happen file a
ticket for release engineering and mention the package name and the branch the package needs to be blocked.

Remarks

Please wait long enough before opening a ticket to avoid unnecessary work.

Use one ticket for all packages you retired at once, do not open one ticket for each package if you retired several packages.

You check whether a package is blocked in koji, e.g. for the package curry there should the a entry with [BLOCKED] for each branch the package was retired in. It is enough for a package to be retired in an older tag to be also blocked in a newer tag due to inheritance:

Unretire a Package

Obsoleting Packages

While not strictly part of the process, please consider what will happen to systems which have the now-retired packages installed. Generally such packages will simply remain on the system as it is updated, becoming increasingly outdated.

Please follow relevant packaging guidelines here if another package will be providing similar or identical functionality to the retired package, or if it is necessary that the package be removed from end-user systems on system updates.